AMD’s new flagship shows some killer performances but comes with a premium $599 price tag, which means it’s more expensive than the competing 14900K. While productivity performance is mostly on par with this Intel beast, the 1080P gaming performance falls behind.
The Ryzen 9 9900X is AMD’s new flagship 12-core gaming chip but with lower base frequencies and a 120-watt rating. It impressed us in most benchmarks outside of gaming, and in gaming, the chip couldn’t even outperform the Ryzen 7 9700X. Its $449 price tag makes it compete with the 7800X3D and 13900K, but the former is a far better gaming CPU, while the latter is much better for both multi-threaded workloads AND gaming.